


all in for you

by stilljunhui (acyria)



Series: Crossover Fics [2]
Category: Monsta X (Band), SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Light Angst, M/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-05
Updated: 2019-04-05
Packaged: 2020-01-05 05:46:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18359843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acyria/pseuds/stilljunhui
Summary: The moment Chae Hyungwon received his soulmate’s name on the back of his neck, he had it burned off.





	all in for you

**Author's Note:**

> This has some references to Monsta X albums and music videos (The Clan, the whole time-related plot that Dramarama had, etc.) and also slightly influenced by The Umbrella Academy (the way everything works here has a lot in common with the Commission if anybody also watched the show!)
> 
> I wasn't sure where I was going with this when I started writing it, but here we are. It's a little incomplete in terms of plot background and ending, but that was kind of how I wanted things to be, in the end. It's also not exactly romantic despite the soulmate trope, so...

The moment Chae Hyungwon received his soulmate’s name on the back of his nape, he had it burned off. It was better that way, for people like him, not to get involved in the whole soulmate business. He didn’t even look at it. The moment he felt it form on his skin, a tingling sensation that took a while to go away, Hyungwon marched right up to Minhyuk’s room with a lighter in hand and pushed it towards the other boy.

“Are you sure?” Minhyuk had asked, one last time. 

“Of course.”

Soulmates, romance, everything of the like—those things were meant for people who deserved to be loved, after all. Hyungwon knew he was better off without such a hindrance in his life. He’s got too much blood on his hands; too many lives taken, too many people who probably lost their own soulmate due to him, too many sins that weighed him down. Sometimes, he wished he never took the job to begin with.

He’s thought about it. He’s thought about what it would be like to just jump back in time for the last time, destroy the watch, and then live on as if he never became part of The Clan. Unfortunately, they found him at a crucial point in his life. Orphaned and reckless, it was all too easy for Hyungwon to accept a chance to escape his miserable life and wreak havoc. It had felt liberating, at first, until he realized there was no escape.

Even if he kept running away, they would always end up finding him.

He was eighteen when his soulmark appeared on his skin.

When Hyungwon was twenty years old, it appeared again, this time on the back of his left leg. He felt it happen in the middle of a job, just as he had shot the target on the back of her head and watched her slump onto the floor, the sensation familiar and unwelcome. When he had cursed, loudly, Hyunwoo actually thought he missed. The younger man gave his superior an incredulous look and said, “when have I ever missed?”

He still didn’t look at the name when he entered Minhyuk’s room again.

The other man had looked surprised, “soulmarks can do that?”

“How am I supposed to know?” Hyungwon asked, flopping down on his friend’s bed, still tired from the latest mission. 36 hours without sleeping had taken its toll on him, but he knew he had to get rid of the name before he slept, otherwise he would wake up tempted to look at it. That wouldn’t have been good. He tossed the blonde his lighter again as Minhyuk caught it with swift fingers and sighed. 

“Maybe this is a sign,” Minhyuk said, despite the way he clicked the lighter on regardless. “Maybe you shouldn’t run away from this.”

“Just do it.”

Hyungwon fell asleep despite the sharp pain on his leg, ignoring the way it seemed to spark all the way up his heart, making his chest ache.

It was when Lee Minhyuk was charged guilty—for stealing a watch and using it to bring his brother back—and sentenced to time banishment, that Hyungwon realized he was right about the fact that he couldn’t escape even if he tried. He thought about the way death seemed like an even better punishment than banishment. The thought of immediate death was better than being transported into a dark world, unsure when death would even come, all alone. 

Still, he knew how he was The Clan’s best asset. 

Even if he killed himself, which was highly tempting now that his best friend was gone from the world, he would just be brought back.

Punished, sure, but it wouldn’t be like what Minhyuk received. They considered the blonde dispensable, his work could easily be picked up by a new recruit, so they had no qualms getting rid of him. All he did was go through the texts that would give them their next target, since he sucked with a gun. They knew of Hyungwon’s stunning track record. At most, he was probably just going to get his brain zapped into obedience like they did the first time he had tried to rebel against his leaders. 

It felt weird having the room across his empty.

Just a few days later, Hyungwon heard that someone was going to be moving in.

“They couldn’t have waited at least a few weeks before replacing him?” He complained to Kihyun in private, when the other man had dropped by to give him his latest mission files. Sure, he didn’t like knowing that the room was empty, but it made his blood boil to see how little they thought of Minhyuk. The latter had been around even before he was recruited, did most of The Clan’s dirty work when nobody was willing, and what do they do? Find some fresh blood to replace him, just like that. 

Kihyun merely shrugged, “are you really surprised? You know how things around here are. Don’t be too harsh on the new recruit, I heard he’s softer than even Minhyuk.”

The raven-haired man winced at the thought. 

He was twenty-three years old when he met Wen Junhui, the recruit who had the pleasure of moving into the room across his, and also the unfortunate job of taking over what Minhyuk once did. The poor kid was swimming in data that had to be organized almost immediately, barely giving him the time to actually get properly integrated with the way things worked. Junhui had eyes that sparkled, Hyungwon couldn’t help but noticed, a rare sight for a job like theirs.

The Chinese man also liked visiting his room.

“Why are you here again?” Hyungwon asked after the third time he heard the knocks on his door.

“My eyes get tired easily,” Junhui replied, making his way through the dimly lit room like he had already memorized it despite it only being his third visit. He always sat on the chair across Hyungwon’s bed, mainly because the older man would choose to lie back down after opening the door, and that day was no different. He spun the chair around once, twice, before shrugging, “besides, you’re not as scary as Hoseok. Have you seen his muscles? He could probably break me in half.”

Hyungwon scoffed, “I’m kind of insulted. You don’t think I’m scary?”

He remembered, far too vividly, the way Junhui blinked at him before a wide smile spread across the younger boy’s face.

“Of course not.”

“Well,” Hyungwon replied after a moment’s pause, meaning every word. “You should be.”

He doesn’t think about soulmates or anything of the sort for a long time after he had his mark burned off the last time. His stance on the matter still hasn’t changed; rather, as the years went by, he felt a lot more certain that he had made the right decision to begin with. Each year of his life just marked another year where he had nothing to do but kill, and kill ruthlessly, with no mercy for any of the targets chosen by The Clan. 

Everything had a purpose, he was always told. 

Time was sacred. 

Time also had a funny way of working against him, Hyungwon was beginning to think to himself, when he felt his soulmark appear once more. This time, it was on his left shoulder. He still refused to look at it, but now that Minhyuk was gone and he didn’t quite trust anybody else the same way, he was stuck with it. He still got daily visits from Junhui, who crossed his mind as a possible candidate to help him, but he ultimately decided against it.

As if to add more pressure on him, the next day Junhui had decided to point at the scar on his neck and ask, “what happened there?”

“None of your business,” came Hyungwon’s quick, clipped reply, still touchy about the subject and all too aware of the name on his shoulder. 

The younger man pouted, “I thought we were friends.”

“Friends can keep secrets from each other.”

“So you agree,” the brunette said, his pout disappearing into a grin all too quickly. “We’re friends?” 

At that, Hyungwon couldn’t help but actually laugh, the sound unfamiliar even to his own ears. He knew it from the beginning, but everything about Wen Junhui just seemed so out of place in the world they both lived in. It was like the other man was some rare beacon of light in the otherwise dreary atmosphere. He was a little bit like Minhyuk, in a way, with the way it was easy to make them smile or laugh. Not to mention, with how easy it was to make Hyungwon himself smile in their presence. 

He felt his earlier tension leave his body at the thought.

“Sure, whatever you say.”

When Hyungwon turned twenty-five, he considered it a miracle that he had managed to go so long without looking at the name on his shoulder. In fact, at some point, he had just forgotten all about it. He never wore anything apart from long-sleeved shirts, sweaters, and jackets, anyway. So while that was no longer a problem, he found himself dealing with another problem. A much bigger problem by the name of Wen Junhui, who still insisted on staying in his room whenever he was actually around. 

They were friends, that much was sure, and their topics were slowly beginning to drift from mindless stories to much deeper territories. 

Once, Junhui began to share about his family, a topic rarely heard in The Clan. Most of the recruits were orphans, after all—like Hyungwon—or if not orphaned, they were estranged from their family one way or another. It had always made the job infinitely easier, to have such little connection to the real world, to be so disconnected from such a feeling like familial love. Love of any sort, really. 

Still, the brunette spoke about his family with a small smile on his face.

“I wonder if they’re looking for me,” he wondered out loud, spinning idly as he sat on Hyungwon’s chair. “It has been a few years, though. Maybe they stopped by now.”

“Do you miss them?” The older man asked before he could stop himself, chastising his stupid question right after it left his mouth. Anybody with two working eyes could see how much Junhui missed his family, after all. “Well, I mean, do you regret leaving? You could have said no when the job was offered to you.”

It took a while before Junhui answered, “I’m not sure yet. I haven’t quite found what I’m looking for, so I can’t say.”

“What are you looking for?”

“My soulmate.”

At that, the raven-haired man could feel the skin on his shoulder prickle, as if trying to remind him of the name that was marked there. 

“That’s what they promised me,” Junhui continued softly when he received no immediate reply, twiddling with his fingers, voice small as he explained further. “They said if I went with them and did as told, I was sure to meet my soulmate. I haven’t gotten my soulmark yet, so I’m just waiting for that to happen, then I was thinking of asking if I could look for them. Maybe things would work out, I mean—”  
“In this mess we’re living in?” Hyungwon couldn’t help the scoff that left his lips. “Yeah, right. I hate to be the one to break it to you, but I’m pretty sure they were lying to you.”

He sat up from his bed and turned his back towards Junhui, pulling his shirt collar down to reveal the scar on the back of his neck, the same one the Chinese man had wondered about just a few years back. It had flattened out a little bit over time, but it was still clearly there, a prominent red mark across his otherwise pale skin. 

“I burn mine off every time I get it,” he explained when he turned back to Junhui, who had a somewhat sad look on his face that made something in Hyungwon bristle, but he ignored it. 

“Do you know what’s written, at least?”

Hyungwon shook his head, “nope. I got my friend to burn it off twice now.”

“Do you regret it?”  
“Never.”

A few weeks later, everything seemed to happen all at once. Kihyun entered his room with a somber expression, handing him the latest kill file without a single word or quip, before leaving just as quickly as he came. Hyungwon found the whole thing odd and wondered why, until he opened the file and the name _Wen Junhui_ stared him in the face. The file said that Junhui was going to run away from The Clan that same day. 

Hyungwon was to terminate him immediately or risk execution himself.

There came a knock on his door just minutes later.

“Hyungwon,” Junhui said a little breathlessly when the door was opened, as the older man moved to let him in. “I have something really important to tell you.”

“So do I,” Hyungwon couldn’t help but say, thinking back to the file that was still laid open on his desk. He’s had a close friend taken away from him once before, he wasn’t going to let it happen again. He was also most definitely not going to do it himself, The Clan be damned. They could have chosen literally any other agent, why did they have to choose him to do it?

The brunette shook his head, “that can wait. I was going through the data just now. Your name showed up. It’s being processed now, soon you’ll have a kill order, and I—I can’t just—“

Oh. There were a lot of reasons why Hyungwon’s name would appear explicitly in the algorithm, but he zeroed it in on the fact that he had already decided that he was going to save Junhui even _before_ he knew he had decided on doing so. That must have also meant that the other boy was going to escape The Clan _because_ of Hyungwon. It was all connected, in a sick way that The Clan must have known about even before everything even happened.

Everything had a purpose.

“I can’t let you die,” Junhui said in between flustered breaths. 

“Breathe,” Hyungwon said, holding the other’s shoulders while he tried to think of how exactly they were going to escape. He knew that even with a kill order, The Clan would have to be stupid to get him killed. He was still the best in the field. Junhui, though? They would definitely kill him without a second thought. “Look, it’s a long story, but we have to go.”

“Go where?”

“Escape,” he said, moving towards his closet and pulling out a backpack. “Both of us. I got a kill order for you, Junhui. You’re not safe here either.”

“Why would they do that to us though?”

“I don’t know, but I’m not surprised,” Hyungwon admitted, pulling off his sweater in favour of wearing a bulletproof vest that he had unearthed beneath the rest of his clothes, when he heard the other boy gasp loudly. For a brief moment, he thought it was because he had just decided to undress in front of the younger boy and was about to apologize for it, but Junhui had grabbed his arm before he could put his sweater back on.

He was staring at a spot on Hyungwon’s shoulder when realization dawned on the elder.

“I completely forgot to get that burned off,” he said with a scowl. “No time for that now, though, we have to g—“

“I think,” Junhui interrupted, eyes blinking rapidly. “I think I know why we have to run.”

“ _What?_ ”

The younger boy traced the soulmark with his finger, “it’s me. I’m your soulmate.”

“Look,” Hyungwon said, snapping out of his momentary daze upon being told that the person standing in front of him was his soulmate, because he had no time for that. Not in the same way he thought about it before though; no, he quite liked the thought that Junhui was his soulmate, sometimes wished that was the case, even. “If neither of us move _now_ , then we’re going to die, so sappy get-together later, okay?”

“Right,” the brunette said, nodding and quickly moving to leave the room and get his own stuff prepared. “I’ll go get ready and come back.”

The first thing Chae Hyungwon thought of as he slung his backpack across his shoulder was how proud Minhyuk would have been if he found out that Hyungwon did end up choosing his soulmate over The Clan, despite trying to escape his fate for so long. The last thing he thought of was The Clan’s slogan. Everything had a purpose. Now, he just had to hope he could escape the purpose that was already set for him and Junhui.

**Author's Note:**

> I,,, didn't want to outright kill Minhyuk,,,,, so I tried to think of something else that could be done to him. Also, despite this being a Hyungwon x Junhui fic, ya'll can tell I have some very slight Hyungwon x Minhyuk undertones in this fic because I love them as well!!! I just really wanted to satisfy my need for more content from these two. 
> 
> I might end up writing either a prequel or a sequel or both.........or make this a lot longer and fleshed out..........


End file.
